Hi, On 11/13/17 13:04, Christoph Hormann wrote: > On Monday 13 November 2017, Yuri Astrakhan wrote: >> Christoph, thanks for clarifying. I should have been a bit more >> careful with that word. Could you clarify one thing - if wiki is not >> authoritative for deprecation, than what is? "Community consensus >> that something is not to be used" has to be documented somewhere, >> right?
> No, it does not have to. It is the nature of most societies that not > all social rules that exist are also codified. The process of becoming > a member of the OSM community to a large part consists of becoming > familiar with and developing an intuitive understanding of the > unwritten rules. If I may add something here: OpenStreetMap has many unwritten rules and this usually isn't a problem if someone goes through a normal socialisation process - starting small with a few edits around their house, looking around what others do, following a discussion or two, etc.; they will pick up the rules as they go. This is just like in any other society. It can go wrong when people from outside of OSM come in and want to "hit the ground running", believing that their age, their life experience, or their IT skills will automatically make them a black-belt member of the OSM community. Upon noticing that there's maybe more to OSM than can be seen from the API wiki page, some people try to slow down and adapt, while others keep running and explain to everyone in OSM how they're doing it wrong (or blame OSM for not having an exhaustive handbook that you can study in order to avoid having to talk to actual people). Most rules that you find written in the Wiki were unwritten rules first, and have been written down in order to make the onboarding easier for new people - for example, we talked about "not tagging for the renderer" long before http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging_for_the_renderer existed. The wiki page now tries to explain that unwritten rule to people, but that doesn't mean the wiki page *is* the rule. It's like when you read in a travel guide that walking barefoot is frowned upon in the country you plan to visit. The travel guide is trying to be helpful so you don't embarrass yourself but the travel guide isn't the authority. So yes, like Christoph says, in OSM community consensus isn't necessarily written somewhere because you will learn about it while becoming a member of the community. Even so, everyday normal mapping (even by a total newbie) hardly ever falls foul of community consensus if mappers let themselves be guided by presets and try do "blend in". It works reasonably well on the whole. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
